Feeling Rumi

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.”–Rumi

I re-discovered Rumi last week. I went on the internet looking for something else and landed on a very unassuming site that had something like 50 poems by this 13th century Sufi mystic. I ended up spending the better part of two hours scrolling down each one, swooning.

Rumi makes me go weak in the knees. His poetry is so fluid, yet it has this way of jolting me wide awake, in the gentlest way; a direct hit to the heart every time I read it.

Though it’s impossible to choose which ones to showcase today, here are a few selections of the poems that made my knees go the weakest, reminding me to…

Invite beauty and gratitude…

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

Invite the present moment…

“Keep walking
Though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within
but don’t move
The way that fear makes you move.”

Invite silence…

“There is a channel between voice and presence,
A way where information flows.
In disciplined silence the channel opens.
With wandering talk, it closes.”

Invite flow…

“…Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence
is in every small contraction and expansion,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.”

“Your deepest presence is in every small contraction and expansion.” Still breathing with this one.

How about you? What do these poems do for you? How do they make you feel? Which poems, poets, artists, or artistic expresssions make your heart go pitter pat?

Photo: Viking [via Google Images]